So we have an early morning accommodation passenger train, No. 1, leaving Rockville at 6:10 o’clock and proceeding at a leisurely rate of about twenty miles an hour (which makes allowances for local stops) all the way to Somerset at the far end of the division, which it is due to reach at 11:45 A. M. It is halted for any length of time only at Honeytown, where upbound No. 8—local accommodation—and upbound No. 6—fast express—will pass it. At 6:20 o’clock an upbound local accommodation of the same nature as No. 1, and hence known as No. 2, leaves Somerset and, halting only at Robbins’s Corners to permit the fast upbound No. 6 to overhaul and pass it, reaches Rockville at 1 P. M. Train No. 31, which follows No. 1 out of Rockville forty minutes later, is a milk train, and so must have a liberal allowance for stops. It proceeds only as far as Stoneville, where the dairy country ends, stops there long enough to turn and to water the engine, and then returns to Rockville as No. 32. Train No. 117 is a way-freight, and still slower. So it follows the milk-train. It is known as a “low-class” train by the railroaders. It must wait everywhere for better class trains to pass it. Train No. 118 is the same class of train, proceeding in the opposing direction. Train No. 5 is a down express.
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How the real time table of the division looks—the one used in headquarters
Sometimes unforeseen demands of traffic necessitate the running of extra trains, and these may be strung across the board. This board, in reality, has all its trains placed upon it by strings and pins, to admit of the constant changes that the schedules are always undergoing, and the addition of a new train is a quick proceeding. As a matter of fact, a skilled train-master or despatcher will rarely take the time actually to string an extra train. He carries the schedule too completely in his head to admit of such a necessity.
But the extra train is best placed following, as a second section, some good passenger train, as indicated on the diagram. The regular train will then carry signals showing that it is followed on this particular day. While the train orders protect its movement in any event, as will be shown in a moment, the billing of the extra train as a second section is less of an upset to the regular operation of the division. Practised operating men found years ago that the fewer deviations made from the regular programme of the day, the higher the proportion of safety arose.
Now you begin to see the use of the train-despatcher. If the unforeseen never came to pass upon the railroad, instead of coming to pass nearly every hour, there might be no need of that officer. Each engineer, each conductor, each station agent would have his complete time-tables, and the road would run every day in full accordance with them. That was the very earliest and the most primitive way of operating railroads. Almost as early the need arose of having a special direction over the operation of the trains. Emergencies arose daily. Trains were often late; storms beat down upon the line; the snow covered its rails; what might have been, according to the time-card, an orderly operation of line, became chaos. If a train was ordered by schedule to meet a train bound in the opposite direction at P——, it might wait there for long hours, not knowing that the other engine was broken down at A——.
The invention of the telegraph and its almost instant application to the railroad service made such special direction possible. So now we find the explicit directions of the schedule supplemented by even more explicit directions from the train-despatcher at the head of the train movements upon each division. Briefly stated, it may be said that the engineer and the conductor in charge of a train are first guided by the schedule, which, after many revisions, has been compiled with great care, and in reference to connecting lines, branches, and adjoining divisions. This schedule acts in conjunction with certain simple fundamental rules of operation, the A, B, C of every railroader. By one of these, trains of the same class bound north or east are given precedence, all other things being equal, over trains bound south or west. This rule is sometimes superseded by one giving right-of-way to trains bound up the line—or the reverse.
High-class trains, like the fastest limited expresses, have precedence over trains of graduated lower classes—down to the slow-moving heavy freights. When any sort of train loses a certain length of time—usually half an hour or more—it loses all rights that it might ever have had, and everything else on the line has precedence over it. A train may lose time if it has to, but there are never any circumstances that will justify it in running ahead of time.
All this is the part of railroad operation which governs the relation of one train to another. There are even simpler but not less vital rules that control its own operation. In order that the engineer who is guiding the train, and the conductor who shares the responsibility, may keep in touch with one another, the device was adopted many years ago of having a cord run through the cars of passenger trains to a bell signal in the cab of the engine. This bell signal during recent years has given way to an improved form of locomotive signal, sounded by means of compressed air in tubes throughout the train, and operated in connection with the air-brake equipment.